The rise of information activism: how to bridge dualisms and reconceptualise political participation

ABSTRACT

While conventional wisdom sees politics as involving collective action in the political arena, some contemporary approaches focus on connective action beyond the political arena. Crucially, both treat the distinction between arena and process definitions of politics, and relatedly between collective and connective, as dualisms. This paper looks to reconceptualise political participation by arguing that these two dualisms should be treated as dualities. In doing so, it posits a new form of political participation, ‘information activism’ and explores it in practice by drawing on survey data from the 2013 political protests in Turkey.

KEYWORDS:

• Politics
• web 2.0
• e-democracy
• computer-mediated communication
• political participation
• information activism

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank David Marsh for his continued support throughout the development of this piece. I would also like to thank Michael J. Jessen for his invaluable help with the analysis of the data. Finally, I would like to thank the reviewers for their comments, and the editors of Information, Communication & Society for their guidance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Max Halupka is a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute for Governance and Policy Analysis, University of Canberra. He is completing his Ph.D. via publication, and will be focusing his research on the role on emerging forms of political participation. [email: [email protected]]